Gangs of New York Reviews

Here are some more great quotes from the MANY reviews I have read:

"Doubtless, DiCaprio is smart and talented. Doubtless, he has made wise choices which not only shake off his fame, but helped him survive the madness of fame. It`s true that he has managed to portray a huge variety of roles...And now as a butterfly, he flies from flower to flower, without staying in one place for a long time. But we forgive him for that. Not because he`s young and beautiful. Not because he`s a good actor and has a good soul. But because his biggest ambition and devotion is to be a part of "great films"."

DiCaprio is terrific. He disappears into his quieted, violent maturity with a careful sense of patience. What makes his inclusion here, among other things, so necessary, is his visionary self-image of a smaller-than-life, shrugging matinee idol. While Brendan Gleeson (as Monk) and Jim Broadbent (as Tweed) are casually, repeatedly trying to simultaneously one-up Bill while, in their eyes, not offend Bill - Amsterdam wanders around in the same sort of fog, playing dumb, secretly shifty, all the while grilling over a horrible wrong in his head. His outward appearance, as he constructs his vengeance – and this is a stroke of brilliance – hints very subtly at the world within his rage. It seems Scorsese has instructed DiCaprio to just stop acting already, put the whole thing aside, and prance around as if his homecoming were merely a first visit to this little corner of hell. It’s a technique that not only works, but runs perfect counterpoint to Bill’s longtime security: In the end, when everything begins to come apart – both around them and within them – it’s like the tortoise and the hare: Bill gets comfortable, thinking Amsterdam to be nothing, and Amsterdam strikes.

Gangs of New York simmers with excellent performances. There is Leonardo DiCaprio as the revenge-hungry young man, living minute by minute within the shadow of the psychotic Bill. His eyes do the acting and go from fear to recognition to wary and back to fear again. His scenes with the street-smart Cameron Diaz have spark and verve

DiCaprio portrays Amsterdam with a mixture of boyish bravado and steely determination. His ambivalence toward Bill creates an emotional turmoil that takes most of the film’s two hours and 40 minutes to resolve....

Scorsese's two lead actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis, spin superb emotion into their performances, and the film burns an impression on the mind. This is a memorable story about passion, regret and, eventually, the sad futility of it all.

DiCaprio sheds his pretty-boy typecast and is fiery and convincing as a tough guy on the rise.

But where Gangs of New York breaks new ground is that no Scorsese film before it has been so willing to let the director’s naked enthusiasm--his love not only for the history within the film and its characters but also the purity of cinema--reveal itself in all of its unabashed glory.

Having seen it myself finally I can definitely say: this IS Scorsese's masterpiece, a brilliant film from begining to end.

• October 29 2003: Empire online: 5 star films
  Review by Alan Morrison

On March 23 of this year, a serious robbery took place at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.
The victim:Martin Scorsese.

The assailant:Oscar voters who didn't have the guts to give Gangs of New York its due.

Ten nominations, no awards, a travesty.

Uneasy with the aggressive global situation surrounding the ceremony,Academy members
were always unlikely to honour a film that revealed the foundation of modern America to be political corruption, violence and xenophobia.
Cinema audiences were also slow to respond.Many didn't appreciate Scorsese's
juxtaposition of a personal revenge story with the wider explosion of the 19th century
Draft Riots.But subsequent viewings of the film confirm just what a bold undertaking
this long-awaited project really is.

This is cinema spectacle on a grand scale-can anyone really argue that the three-
dimensionality of Dante Ferretti's sets or the variety of Sandy Powell's intricately
detailed costumes are less impressive than the second-hand theatrical borrowings of
Chicago?
Then there's Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Bill the Butcher-tremendous in its
grandstanding excess,but also astonishingly powerful when he takes it down a notch in
his "I never had a son" speech beside Leonardo Dicaprio's bed.
Superbly edited action sequences,memorable acting and an uncompromising vision of the
bloody birth of democracy:here big ideas and a high entertainment factor crash together with as much force as a meat cleaver into the back of a Five Points street brawler.

• December 21 2002 - ROGER EBERT Chicago Sun Times - Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past. The New York it portrays in the years between the 1840s and the Civil War is, as a character observes, "the forge of hell," in which groups clear space by killing their rivals. Competing fire brigades and police forces fight in the streets, audiences throw rotten fruit at an actor portraying Abraham Lincoln, blacks and Irish are chased by mobs, and Navy ships fire on the city as the poor riot against the draft.

The film opens with an extraordinary scene set beneath tenements, in catacombs carved out of the Manhattan rock. An Irish-American leader named Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) prepares for battle almost as if preparing for the Mass--indeed, as he puts on a collar to protect his neck, we think for a moment he might be a priest. With his young son Amsterdam trailing behind, he walks through the labyrinth of this torchlit Hades, gathering his forces, the Dead Rabbits, before stalking out into daylight to fight the forces of a rival American-born gang, the Nativists.

Men use knives, swords, bayonets, cleavers, cudgels. The ferocity of their battle is animalistic. At the end, the field is littered with bodies--including that of Vallon, slain by his enemy William Cutting, aka Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). This was the famous gang fight of Five Points on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, recorded in American history but not underlined. When it is over, Amsterdam disappears into an orphanage, the ominously named Hellgate House of Reform. He emerges in his early 20s (now played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and returns to Five Points, still ruled by Bill, and begins a scheme to avenge his father.

The vivid achievement of Scorsese's film is to visualize this history and people it with characters of Dickensian grotesquerie. Bill the Butcher is one of the great characters in modern movies, with his strangely elaborate diction, his choked accent, his odd way of combining ruthlessness with philosophy. The canvas is filled with many other colorful characters, including a pickpocket named Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a hired club named Monk (Brendan Gleeson), the shopkeeper Happy Jack (John C. Reilly), and historical figures such as William "Boss" Tweed (Jim Broadbent), ruler of corrupt Tammany Hall, and P.T. Barnum (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), whose museum of curiosities scarcely rivals the daily displays on the streets.

Scorsese's hero, Amsterdam, plays much the same role as a Dickens hero like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist: He is the eyes through which we see the others but is not the most colorful person on the canvas. Amsterdam is not as wild, as vicious or as eccentric as the people around him, and may not be any tougher than his eventual girlfriend Jenny, who like Nancy in Oliver Twist is a hellcat with a fierce loyalty to her man. DiCaprio's character, more focused and centered, is a useful contrast to the wild men around him.

Certainly, Day-Lewis is inspired by an intense ferocity, laced with humor and a certain analytical detachment, as Bill the Butcher. He is a fearsome man, fond of using his knife to tap his glass eye, and he uses a pig carcass to show Amsterdam the various ways to kill a man with a knife. Bill is a skilled knife artist, and terrifies Jenny, his target for a knife-throwing act, not only by coming close to killing her but also by his ornate and ominous word choices.

Diaz plays Jenny as a woman who at first insists on her own independence; as a pickpocket, she ranks high in the criminal hierarchy, and even dresses up to prey on the rich people uptown. But when she finally caves in to Amsterdam's love, she proves tender and loyal, in one love scene where they compare their scars, and another where she nurses him back to health.

The movie is straightforward in its cynicism about democracy at that time. Tammany Hall buys and sells votes, ethnic groups are delivered by their leaders, and when the wrong man is elected sheriff he does not serve for long. That American democracy emerged from this cauldron is miraculous. We put the Founding Fathers on our money, but these Founding Crooks for a long time held sway.

Scorsese is probably our greatest active American director (Robert Altman is another candidate), and he has given us so many masterpieces that this film, which from another director would be a triumph, arrives as a more measured accomplishment. It was a difficult film to make, as we know from the reports that drifted back from the vast and expensive sets constructed at Cinecitta in Rome. The budget was enormous, the running time was problematical.

The result is a considerable achievement, a revisionist history linking the birth of American democracy and American crime. It brings us astonishing sights, as in a scene that shows us the inside of a tenement, with families stacked on top of one another in rooms like shelves. Or in the ferocity of the Draft Riots, which all but destroyed the city. It is instructive to be reminded that modern America was forged not in quiet rooms by great men in wigs, but in the streets, in the clash of immigrant groups, in a bloody Darwinian struggle.

All of this is a triumph for Scorsese, and yet I do not think this film is in the first rank of his masterpieces. It is very good but not great. I wrote recently of "GoodFellas" that "the film has the headlong momentum of a storyteller who knows he has a good one to share." I didn't feel that here. Scorsese's films usually leap joyfully onto the screen, the work of a master in command of his craft. Here there seems more struggle, more weight to overcome, more darkness. It is a story that Scorsese has filmed without entirely internalizing. The gangsters in his earlier films are motivated by greed, ego and power; they like nice cars, shoes, suits, dinners, women. They murder as a cost of doing business. The characters in "Gangs of New York" kill because they like to and want to. They are bloodthirsty, and motivated by hate. I think Scorsese liked the heroes of "GoodFellas," "Casino" and "Mean Streets," but I'm not sure he likes this crowd.

 

• December 21 2002 - M. Wilmington-Chicago Tribune: "Gangs of New York," a period epic of hatred and fire, is set in classic Martin Scorsese territory: Manhattan's Lower East Side, the turf known as Five Points. But like many great movies, it also transports us to a more personalized world: Scorsese's tempestuous vision of New York City's ethnic and immigrant street gangs in the 19th century - a melting-pot drama of poverty, dreams, violence and corruption, climaxing in the bloody convulsion of the city's 1863 Civil War draft riots.

  Working from a story that haunted him for 30 years, with a historical canvas spun from Herbert Asbury's 1928 book (also called "Gangs of New York"), Scorsese gives us a meticulously realized tapestry teeming with life. It's a drama of revenge and obsession, focused on a moody young rebel (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his murderous nemesis (Daniel Day-Lewis).

  It's a movie of grand, reckless ambition. It's history written in lightning, as Woodrow Wilson said of "The Birth of a Nation," but also history written in blood, sex and tears, by a filmmaker of extraordinary gifts and temperament. And if it isn't the career-capping masterpiece many have hoped for, it's still a knockout of a picture, full of treasures of acting, production and cinematography. This is a film burning with creative passion, overreaching, magnificently wild. If there's a major flaw in "Gangs of New York," in fact, it's that the movie, even at close to three hours, is too short.

  The action swirls around DiCaprio's Amsterdam Vallon, an orphan who plunges into the brutal Five Points domain of gang boss "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Day-Lewis) and political kingmaker "Boss" Tweed (Jim Broadbent), helping to turn it into a battleground and inferno. Amsterdam's motives are personal: Bill the Butcher killed the boy's father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), in a vicious 1846 street war between Priest's Irish immigrants and Bill's nativists (mostly Anglo and Dutch). That bravura opening sequence is prelude to the stormy symphony of carnage in which we meet Brendan Gleeson's notched-club mercenary Monk McGinn and John C. Reilly's genial bully Happy Jack (two thugs who become cops).

  When Amsterdam emerges 16 years later from the city's Hellgate House of Reform, he is an ambivalent young man whose cards are kept close to the vest, working his way into Bill's inner circle while he secretly courts Bill's doxy, pickpocket Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a refreshingly astringent heroine. But revenge is what Amsterdam wants. Like many Scorsese stories - "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" - "Gangs" takes a violent quest for redemption and veers it into chaos or tragedy.

  If Amsterdam is the nominal center, Day-Lewis' memorably evil gang leader Bill the Butcher is the movie's dark heart. Day-Lewis, in his first film since 1997's "The Boxer," catches fire in one of the year's best performances and one of the most stunning in any Scorsese movie. Its sheer physical roughness is something of a shocker, belying Day-Lewis' well-bred British background and many of his previous roles. Butcher is a force of brute American violence and narcissism, shot through with constant malevolence. It's a role ripe for a De Niro, and Day-Lewis plays it with De Niro's mix of flash-point temper and wary, mocking smile, beaming with delight as the world keeps living up to his bad opinion. Bill is a bloody dandy in rakish derby, calmly conversant in the right knife thrusts that slaughter men and cattle alike. He's a completely unrepressed man who truly feels he reigns in hell.

  "Gangs" will divide its audiences, but only because we tend to judge Scorsese on the highest level, which is where he belongs. As I watched, though, I was caught up totally in the vivid, dreamlike world the director, production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus have wrought: a period Manhattan of warring immigrants, cavernous breweries, mansions, mud-splattered streets and smoky, jam-packed barrooms, sumptuously recreated on Italy's Cinecitta soundstages. The movie has a real pulse, the sense of a whole dangerous world pressing in relentlessly on the characters.

  That world seethes with promise and threat, opportunity and injustice. Obviously, Scorsese and his original writer, Jay Cocks (whose script was reworked by Stephen Zaillian, Kenneth Lonergan and the uncredited Hossein Amini), were thinking of the Vietnam War years when they began working on "Gangs" in the '70s. Though they make links between the two eras of draft protest, they show both the vital and destructive sides of the protests here: poor people protesting the immunity of the sons of wealth to the draft, while bigots exploited the chaos to kill and lynch blacks. It's almost eerie bad timing that the film finally emerges in 2002, with war clouds again on the horizon but the national mood greatly shifted.

  There's a universality to "Gangs" that overshadows any topical parallels. Yet, by the end, you can feel Scorsese and his longtime editor (the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker) rushing us along with important things left unsaid. There's not a boring moment in "Gangs of New York," and the narrative grip relaxes only once (after Amsterdam's first fall), but I still felt some dissatisfaction at the end, simply because I wanted to know more. (This is one DVD and possible director's cut to hunger for.)

  Whatever its minor flaws, "Gangs" is a magnificent throwback to an almost vanished era of epic filmmaking by great filmmakers in thrall to their own passions, rather than to the studio bookkeepers. An epic of society's underside, a dangerous romance, a poem to Manhattan and a majestic opera of bloodshed and crime, "Gangs of New York" may not be the complete masterwork we wanted, but it's definitely the work of a master. 4 stars (out of 4)

• Erin Free - Magazine Gangs: “…gut-churning stuff…” - Martin Scorsese’s new film Gangs Of New York opens with a group of warriors kitting themselves out for battle, playing out like some bigger-pitched tribute to the likes of Mad Max or The Warriors. Kicking off in 1846, this might be Scorsese’s way of tying what is essentially a period piece to the grim realities of the modern day. Or it might just be more evidence of the fact that Scorsese has always liked a good on-screen fight. After several years away from the cinema, Martin Scorsese also seems to be announcing that he’s back with a vengeance. Set among the turmoil of the beginnings of the American Civil War, Gangs Of New York shows a city in strife. And the man who rules it is Bill The Butcher (a wonderfully vivid Day-Lewis, stealing all his scenes), a patriotic gangster-fiend with a glass eye and a taste for mayhem. Everyone is in his pocket except for Amsterdam Vallon (a strong and sympathetic DiCaprio), the vengeful son of the opposing gang leader Bill killed years before. But even their relationship soon becomes clouded by something more, with Cameron Diaz’s dreamy pickpocket caught in the middle. Though dealing with many of his favourite themes (loyalty, religious division, violence, redemption), on the surface there isn’t much of Martin Scorsese in Gangs Of New York. Gone are the stylised camera moves and whiplash editing, replaced by a far more traditionally epic and visually restrained style of filmmaking. The hotly stoked up violence (including long missed old faves like lynchings, knife fights, bludgeonings and mob assaults) gives the film an obvious edge and eye popping quality, but it’s hard not to feel slightly disappointed at seeing Scorsese walking somewhat familiar ground, especially when you realise that this kind of epic violence has been done better in recent films like Braveheart. But this is still gut-churning stuff, and while Gangs Of New York may not be Martin Scorsese at the top of his game, it proves that there’s still a lot of fight in this old cinematic dog.

• The Beach Reporter's Brian J Arthurs - Set in the middle 1800s New York, "Gangs" dramatizes the flood of immigrants -- mostly the Irish escaping their country's potato famine -- pouring into Manhattan, and the effects it had on the rapidly growing city.

  For the most part, the Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan-scripted film focuses on one young man's quest to avenge his father's death. But it becomes a story about our country's integration and the need for people from different races, religions and creeds to come together to lay the foundation for the democracy we now enjoy.

  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Irish American Amsterdam Vallon, a young man who witnessed his father's brutal death at the hands of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) in a turf war fought between two gangs: the Irish gang known as the Dead Rabbits led by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) and "The Butcher's" gang of "Native Americans." All of this takes place in the notorious Five Points section of downtown Manhattan, where most immigrants ultimately landed.

  Orphaned, young Vallon is sent to the "House of Refuge" where he's kept for 16 years. He returns with one goal in mind, exact revenge on the man who killed his father.

  This is a brutal, but crucial, slice of American history. In 1800, New York's population is 60,000. By 1855, it reached 800,000 thanks in large part to the arrival of the Irish. The Irish, it turns out, were not welcomed with open arms. "Natives" like Cutting referred to them as "foreign invaders," whereas those Anglo, Welsh and Dutch immigrants who arrived 50-some years earlier could rightly claim to be natives. Adding further fuel to the flames is the ongoing Civil War, and the emancipation of the slaves in the North.

  His true identity unknown to Cutting, Vallon is able to infiltrate the powerful Cutting's inner circle of thugs and thieves. He learns that Cutting holds the slain Vallon in the highest regard, a man worthy of respect who died honorably. Slowly, Vallon finds himself conflicted over his desire for revenge and the growing father-son relationship that has developed between himself and "The Butcher."

  But his identity cannot be concealed forever, leading to the inevitable confrontation.

  But what's most interesting about "Gangs" is it evolves into more than just a simple revenge plot. Vallon learns that organizing his own people will affect more change for the good than simply taking out one man. New York at this time is riddled with corruption, with crafty politicians (including the real-life Boss Tweed, played here by Jim Broadbent) using bribes and intimidation to get their necessary votes to remain in power. The Civil War draft targets the poor with a policy that allows exemption to the draft at the price of $300, a fee only the wealthiest can afford. This leads to the 1863 Draft Riots, a four-day blood bath that brought the Civil War to the streets of New York. It also overshadowed the impending confrontation between Vallon and The Butcher. Their personal battle is made irrelevant by the events that will create social and political change in the young nation.

  Master filmmaker Scorsese and his team of artists have recreated 1850s New York in meticulous detail. The Five Points is a powder keg ready to explode.

  DiCaprio hasn't been seen on the big screen recently, and sinks his teeth nicely into the role of Vallon. But the acting star of "Gangs" is Daniel Day-Lewis. Lured out of semiretirement (his last film was 1997's "The Boxer"), Lewis creates a larger than life Bill "The Butcher." He's at once terrifying, hilarious, honorable and vicious. It's a magnificent reminder of what a great actor Lewis is.

  The supporting cast is in fine form, too, for the actor-friendly Scorsese. Broadbent and Brendan Gleeson chew up the scenes they appear in. Cameron Diaz is the lone female character Jenny, and attracts the heart of Vallon, but has ties to "The Butcher."

  Rumblings have circulated around the editing of "Gangs"; that Miramax studio head Harvey Weinstein forced Scorsese to tighten the film more than he would have wished. The bottom line is what is presented to audiences. Sure, the story's dense enough that it could have expanded certain aspects, but ultimately what's on screen is a powerful and satisfying work from one of our greatest filmmakers.

• December 20 2002 -Excerpt from spicedwire.com's Rob Blackwelder - Bill the Butcher, as Cutting is known, is a stovepipe-hat-wearing, riff-raff dandy and a much-feared basilisk of all-American ire. "If I had but guns," he says, "I'd shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil." Nonetheless, he has his own kind of moral code and pays reverence to his slain rival for fighting with honor.
  
  But that isn't enough to prevent Amsterdam from seeking revenge when he returns 16 years later, unrecognizable as a young man fresh from a reformatory, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in one of two great performances this holiday season. (The other is Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can," opening Christmas Day.)
  
  Finally getting the "Titanic" monkey off his back, DiCaprio is renewed in this sweeping historical fiction. With dirt under his fingernails and fire in his belly, he's hardened enough to be believable as he beats down one of The Butcher's ruffians in a bare-knuckle brawl that earns him a position under Cutting's unsuspecting wing.
  
  Scorsese also seems invigorated by finally making this film he's had on the back burner for more than a decade. In fact, he is so enamored of the story -- written by Jay Cocks (Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence"), Seven Zaillian ("Schindler's List," "Hannibal") and Kenneth Lonergan ("You Can Count On Me") -- that he gets carried away with the huge budget he's been provided. "Gangs" is conspicuously over-cinematic (crane shots galore) and over-produced.
  
  While its outdoor locations (built on the backlots of Cinecitta Studios in Italy) are transportingly authentic, the indoor sets look like exquisite museums to period grime. Every character looks magnificently scruffy, as if each of their matted hairs was placed exactly where someone wanted it. Every scene is lit to obtrusive perfection and production-designed within an inch of its life. The practical upshot of all this is that the filmmaking sometimes drowns out the plot -- especially in the opening street fight, which is rapidly edited with hundreds of cuts and scored with strangely incongruous electric guitar wail. (On the subject, what's with that U2 song over the closing credits?)
  
  Even Day-Lewis gets caught up in the extravagance, throwing himself into Bill the Butcher's complex but inexorable psyche to such a degree that his intense, blustering, strangely sympathetic performance eventually becomes overbearing.
  
  But the story -- symbolic as it is of the United States' ongoing struggle with violence, culture and class values -- really grabs hold of you with its powerfully brusque depictions of hard-scrambled life. Its authenticity is aided by the inclusion of real historical figures (Jim Broadbent is superb as notoriously crooked politician Boss Tweed) and monumental events in the city's history (like the deadly, epidemic Draft Riots of 1863).
  
  The tag line for this film is "America was born in the streets," and the dark, unspoken truth of that notion comes through quite definitively in the way "Gangs" reproduces one minority group's fight for an American-dream foothold (and for their very lives) against the same kinds of people who hated Italians after they got used to the Irish and detested African-Americans during the Civil Rights movement. And while the movie may not live up to the hype that has surrounded it since its originally scheduled release last Christmas (rumors abound of editing battles between Scorsese and scissor-happy Miramax chair Harvey Weinstein), it is certainly a unique, worthy and rousing glimpse into a part of our history rarely (if ever) portrayed in film.
  
  
• December 20 2002 - Sean O'Connell of filmcritic.com: Because Martin Scorsese's blood runs Big Apple red, it's a remarkable coincidence his first project following September 11 is Gangs of New York, a magnificent drama that seems to spring directly from the panic, violence, pain, and fear the terrorist attacks wrought on the director's hometown. In the wake of 9/11, the master of Mean Streets was almost expected to weigh in and help close the door on our national tragedy.
  
  Over the course of his career, Scorsese has proven he fully understands the tension that once fuelled – and continues to fuel – this powder keg of a city. With Gangs, he rewinds the clocks to present a vicious social and political history lesson that retraces New York's early steps in an effort to better understand the many ingredients of the current Melting Pot.
  
  Let's not get too serious, though. Gangs also works as a simple vengeance picture inflated to serious epic status by its rich set design and stunning period detail. The action begins in 1846 at the so-called Battle of Five Points. Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) leads his proud natives against a band of lowly foreigners – predominantly Irish – and their leader "Priest" Vallon (Liam Neeson). By the end of the day, Five Points will be christened with the blood of hundreds, and Vallon will die at Cutting's hands.
  
  Watching in the wings during the Five Points conflict is Vallon's son, Amsterdam. The stunned child grows into a bitter young man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who's only concern is vengeance. To get "The Butcher," Amsterdam must get close to the man he's been conditioned to hate.
  
  Once the groundwork is laid between Cutting and Amsterdam, Scorsese can't resist exploring his surroundings. The Gangs screenplay dabbles in dirty politics, fixed elections, dramatic shifts in power, and the ever-present Civil War. This New York – much like ours – is a city of tribes. All races live en masse, bound by racist hatred and violence. President Lincoln and his blessed Union are criticized by bigots who fear the abolition of slavery. Territorial spats trigger violent confrontations, and corruption rules.
  
  Scorsese's grand vision also provides a number of distractions to Amsterdam's mission. His father's old gang, the Dead Rabbits, has been scattered to all corners of Five Points. His dalliance with the gorgeous pickpocket Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) is heating up. And he's surprised at how much he enjoys being a member of Cutting's inner circle.
  
  Gangs gets slightly bogged down by Amsterdam's budding relationship with Cutting, but the director's meanderings are kept interesting by Day-Lewis's mesmerizing performance. Cutting is the prototype New Yorker who steps off the boat from a distant country, only to turn around and tell the other "foreigners" to go back where they came from.
  
  Best Actor Oscars were created specifically for performances like the one Day-Lewis gives in Gangs. He's pop culture's answer to Hannibal Lecter, the next Darth Vader in the realm of cinematic baddies. The unpredictable Cutting is pure evil with a thick stew of an accent and a cocky swagger that barely bottles his barn-busting confidence. Look into his eye (the other one's fake because he plucked it out), and behold the true soul of a psychopath.
  
  DiCaprio matures in his role, and provides Cutting with an appropriate foil. The two adversaries are like sparks in a room filled with gunpowder. DiCaprio and Diaz do struggle through a tacked-on romance that's unforced, but also wholly unnecessary. No one's paying attention with "The Butcher" around. Who wants to waste time watching the right fielder or the shortstop when the pitcher's throwing a perfect game?
  
  Gangs is Scorsese's most complete effort in years, the first (and only) "must-see" movie of 2002. By recreating the early days of Manhattan, the director has laced a tragic, over-the-top dance of consuming vengeance and death into the fabric of a gorgeous, courageous period piece. And I'm in it. Well, sort of. In one unintentionally funny scene, my name was shouted by a Union general who was recruiting reluctant Irish draftees for the Civil War. A critic's duty to serve never ends.